Need to get your website recognized? If you are a small business with big plans you probably had a website built and thought orders would just appear. You also may have tried some Pay Per Click advertising and paid to be listed on some directories.
Hopefully you have figured out that people shopping online dont go through a directory to find you. They go to a Search Engine, like Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. They type in a keyword or phrase describing what they want and the Search Engine gives them a list of websites, starting with what the Search Engine believes are the most relevant results.
It is these results, rather being found in the first group of them that drives traffic to your website. No matter what you have to offer the key to success online is to be found on the first page of these search results when someone is looking for what you have to offer.
The great thing about those search results is that they are working every hour of every day. The bad thing is that if you cant be found in those top few results, your neighbor across the street could be looking for what you have to offer and they’ll never find you.
If you have tons of traditional business experience the things you have used in the past to promote your store are going to be pretty much useless online. For instance, before the internet, it was not unusual for a business to spend thousands dollars per month on Yellow page advertising. When the internet first went public that business had to be sure that those ads pointed to their website. Now after only a few years, most households dont even know where their phone book is anymore.
If you have a traditional store, say sports equipment, you may have a few selections for athletic shoes. In your store you may display these shoes according to cost. The typical online shopper is not looking for every shoe you have to offer. They are searching for one brand and one style at every store that offers that one shoe.
In a small town, a local store owner is probably complaining that he has a specific item that he bought from his supplier, and that it will not sell until he discounts it at the end of the season. However, this same item is being sold in the big city and has customers lining up around the block hoping to get a chance to buy this specific item as soon as it is delivered.
Putting his inventory online allows the kids in the big city to find the shoes they want regardless of what small town store has them. It takes a bit to wrap your head around the concept, but suffice it to say that the online shopper is going to be more specific about what they are looking for and they dont really care where your store actually is as long as you can get the product they want delivered to them.
If you are a traditional store that wants to sell your products online, instead of trying to sell things online that you can not move in your store, it is going to be vital to your success to offer your products from the top down. Your website needs to promote your products in an appealing way. A good SEO will be able to match up the hottest searches performed and help you target your campaign by researching products.
Again, just having a cool website is not enough. You are going to need to build that website in a Search Friendly manner. Lets use the shoes one more time. Say you put a great picture of the latest shoe on your website. It is the very one that kids across the country would go get a job for. But if all you have is a picture, the Search Spider cant read your picture. It is not human. It searches for text. Text in the form of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and in the form of content on your page. These are spider food.
The Search Spider searches through your site, following your linking structure. It then records what it finds and takes it back to the Search Engine Database. The Search Engine runs that data through its algorithm to determine what searches your data might be relevant to and how relevant your data is compared to other websites it has recorded.
Whats it all mean? The world has changed. Changed in ways we could not even imagine. If we had computers in the eighteen hundreds, they would have predicted that every city in America would now be twenty feet deep in horse manure.
Your website is proof that you are trying to be a player in the new way of doing business. But now you have to index your site in the way that can be found by the Search Engines, your products can be identified and produced as relevant when a search is done.
Rather than showing a picture of your product and writing a caption under it that says something like This is a very popular item this year, use the terms that someone would type in when they are looking for this exact product. This will more than likely take some effort and refining but diligence and persistence pay off.
Another thing that takes some understanding and patience is to know that the Search Spider does not live on your website. It has other places to go, too. You have to allow it time to get around to checking out your changes.
Dont be afraid to do some investigative work on your own. Check out your competition. See how they describe the products on their site. A little homework on your part will also help you get an understanding of what youre up against.
If you are using Pay Per Click advertising they will provide Keyword Suggestion Tools. But please use caution. These tools are really focusing on getting you to pay to show up in as many searches as they can. Although that might sound like exactly what you want too, the truth is that aside from being expensive, if your site does not exactly match to what the searcher is looking for, you are wasting money.
A Search Optimization Service will be help you focus your energy and resources in the areas that will get you more conversions because you will be showing up for the most relevant searches all the time rather than just when you can afford Pay Per Click advertising.
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[...] Promoting SEO | Make Money Online5 hours ago by Mike Boman Need to get your website recognized? If you are a small business with big plans you probably had a website built and thought orders would just appear. You also may have tried some Pay Per Click advertising and paid to be listed on some …[ ] [...]
Hey Mike,
Great post about on page factors and how they impact a page’s chances of showing up for a particular search term.
Just thought I’d emphasize to your readers that while on-page factors are important in the optimization process, off page factors (i.e. links from other sites/blogs/articles/etc) make the biggest difference in determining whose page shows up on page 1 of the SERPs.
Once the on page optimization is done most of the work in the optimization process still remains to be done. Just wanted to make sure that people understand the SEO is not a one time deal, especially in competitive niches. An off-page optimization campaign is something that needs to be done carefully using properly varied anchor text and conducted on a steady and consistent basis over time (months) until the desired result is achieved.
Cheers,
Jim